The Safest City In The World Isn't In America

America may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it really isn't that safe. In 2017, for example, the independent news organization The Trace says the murder rate in St. Louis was about one in 1,513, or 66.1 murders for every 100,000 people. So it's not like living in the middle ages or anything, where your lifetime chances of dying violently were roughly one in two, but compared to some other cities, one in 1,513 is not great odds.

So what is the safest city in the world? Virginia Beach? Honolulu? Anaheim? Nope. While those are some of the safest cities in America, they don't even come close to the safest city in the world, which is not only not in America, but also not in Canada or Europe, either. The safest city in the world is actually in the Middle East — it's Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. In second place is Doha, Qatar — another city in the Middle East — followed by Quebec, Canada; Taipei, Taiwan; and Munich, Germany. So not only is the safest city in the world not in America, the top five safest cities in the world are also not in America. But wait, there's more ... Dubai in the United Arab Emirates ranked sixth, and two cities in Switzerland — Zurich and Bern — took seventh and eighth place. Hong Kong came in ninth and Eskisehir, Turkey ranked 10th. So not only are the top five safest cities in the world not in America, the top 10 aren't, either. So how far down the list do you have to go before you finally find an American city? Salt Lake City, Utah in 56th place.

It's worth noting that these numbers come from Numbeo.com and the statistics are crowd sourced, so other sources using different data will almost certainly arrive at slightly different conclusions. And these particular rankings are based on crime statistics alone, so they don't take into account things like accident rates, cancer deaths, or other factors that might go into making a city more or less safe to live in. Still, it gives us a rough idea about how much work still needs to be done to make America as safe as it can be.